Day 80

Trail miles: 5

Total: 1021.9

I got up at 5:00 and tried to start laundry, but the power was off. And right as I was about to leave it turned on. So Brad and I threw out clothes in the laundry and showered. That meant I had to put dirty clothes back on though. But at this point I stink regardless and I don’t care anymore. Especially at a campground. Breakfast was no better than dinner. And lunch was great (I got a fancy hot dog), but it took so long to get service that I had to push our shuttle time back a couple hours. The big event of the day was Spare Change and Raechel came up with the idea for horseback riding! So Raechel, Spare Change, Krista, Brad, Lifeguard, Big Owl, and I all went on a trail ride for about an hour. It was a lot of fun! The guide even took us across a bridge twice. My horse, Reno, was slower uphills (very fitting) so I got to make him “trot” a little. Probably not actually real trotting. It gave me some good insight and appreciation of how the horses maneuver the trails and rocks.

I was checking out with my resupply and it took the woman like 5 minutes to scan everything. When I went to pay, the computer screen went blank. She said “the computer says the payment went through and I’m not scanning everything again” so I just walked out of there with free resupply for the section! We got rid of my bear canister and sent home my ice axe. We said goodbye to Cool Beans as he makes his was to Minnesota to teach kids at summer camp how to speak Danish. We will miss you Beans! Don’t forget the soccer team! We were back on trail by 4:30pm and it was so cold. We made good time on the hill. At the top, we were passed by the search and rescue team on horseback coming back after picking up a girl with a broken ankle. I hope that I can help like they do when I return home, maybe back with the Nordic Ski Patrollers. There was a ton of snow on the decent, but frozen enough not to post hole or worry about falling. We cut so many switchbacks and lost the trail constantly. We try to follow what we think is the path of least resistance or where we see the most footprints (or in our case, horse prints). We found a nice flat spot in the trees to make camp. It is supposed to drop below freezing tonight. Since I no longer have my bear canister, I switched to the bear hanging method. My food is so heavy that Krista and I came up with a way to pull it up into the air. I tie the rope around a stick and roll it around the stick to raise it up. Then I tie it to the tree. It took a lot of tries to get it to work and we were laughing so hard at my bad tossing skills. I threw the bag to get the string over the branch and completely missed but somehow got it on a different one. The. Krista tried pulling the sticking but tripped on a rock and fell down losing the food load. It was a mess, but we will perfect our technique! It’s going to be a nightmare to untie and put away tomorrow. Still not worse than carrying the bear canister though.